Doug Fehan

"You Know How Racing Is. It's Like a Drug."

When General Motors shut down most of its racing programs at the end of 1992 because of economic problems, there wasn't anything interesting for me to do. So I turned to my tremendous passion for golf and invented a golf bag travel cover with wheels, got it patented and became a part of the golf industry. But you know how racing is. It's like a drug. Before long I was back, first as the program manager of Riley & Scott Racing's Oldsmobile Aurora World Sports Car team, which won Daytona, Sebring and the 1996 championship; then as the program manager of the Corvette Racing team run by Pratt & Miller. We spent 1997 and '98 working in secret, building a prototype and testing it. Once we evaluated it and figured out we could be competitive, we decided to race in the American Le Mans Series where we could go head to head with Viper and Porsche.

We debuted the car at Daytona in January 1999 and led that race until the 22nd hour when we burned the piston rings out of cylinder eight of the lead car. We ended up finishing 3rd and got on the podium in our very first race. The following year we finished 2nd overall at Daytona, to a Viper, by 32 seconds. That was heartbreaking. We went back and busted our hump and got our first Corvette win at Texas Motor Speedway in September of that year. It was 117 degrees—at night! No one had raced there before, so all teams were on an even keel, which was to our advantage because our guys did such a great job preparing the race car and doing advance work. The Viper team never had a chance. I think we ended up lapping them.

But the breakthrough year for us was 2001. That's when the Earnhardts raced with us and we won Daytona overall. So cool. And then to go out and win our first Le Mans, that was just unbelievable.

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Three or four years ago when I noticed that the GT1 competition both here and at Le Mans was evaporating, I told the guys in the ALMS, "We really need to think about a single GT class." And they said, "We've been talking about the same thing." Then I went to the ACO. They liked the idea too. But we had to buy a little time before making the transition from two GT categories to a single one to avoid the perception that, technologically speaking, this would be a step down. Because it isn't. In fact, this year GT is going to be huge.

I'm heartened by the course that the ALMS has taken, making GT a series with reasonably controlled technology. You have Corvette, Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, Jaguar, Ford, Panoz and Viper all competing. It's awesome. It's what the fans want to see. They want to see cars that they recognize, cars that they can go to the dealer and buy. People have embraced ALMS racing. And the Michelin Green X Challenge has encouraged teams to develop cars that are more efficient on the racetrack. That's so leading edge. People are attracted to that too. In fact, this whole green racing thing has expanded the reach of the American Le Mans Series. People who may have not been interested in racing suddenly are because it's an environmental thing. We have to look to the future and that's what the ALMS is doing. And I think that's why it's attracted the manufacturers.

This year is shaping up to be the single most exciting season of racing since we started the Corvette Racing program in 1999. Everybody on this team is totally energized by where we are, what we're going to do, and the competition we're going to face. We'll be racing two factory-backed C6.Rs powered by a reduced displacement version of Chevrolet's latest LS7 V-8. The block comes right off the assembly line, but we've destroked and sleeved it from 7.0 liters to 5.5 since that's the limit set by the ACO and the FIA.

Of course, the key to our success is the people. The Jim Millers, the Gary Pratts, the GM bosses like Herb Fishel and John Middlebrook who had the vision, who had the trust. Every program has to have a face and I happen to be lucky enough to be that face. But the grunt work, the trench work, is done by all those guys. That's the reason we're successful. It's just a collection of great people.

Doug Fehan has served as program manager for numerous championship-winning Ford- and General Motors-backed road-racing teams, including Corvette Racing, which has won eight manufacturers titles and seven drivers titles since 1999.